The village looked like it had been built from the bones of something ancient and too tired to remember what it once was. Every wall was dust-grey, every roof broken by time, every street cracked like it had tried to scream and the sound got stuck in its throat. Though the locals still called it a "village," it stretched wide and far, sprawling like a fallen city that had never known joy—only survival and ash.
Its buildings clawed at the horizon, low and uneven, like malformed teeth in a crumbling jaw. The stone they were carved from was veined with long-forgotten violence—fractures that pulsed with no light, no warmth. Just memory. And people... people moved through this place like ghosts who hadn't yet realized they were dead. They shuffled through tight alleyways and over open ruins with the kind of stillness that spoke more of exhaustion than peace.
Every breath drawn into weary lungs came out in a cough—dry, hacking, wet, desperate. No one mentioned it. Whether it was the dust, some lingering sickness, or a curse sewn into the very soil, it had become background noise to their existence.
Above it all loomed a skyless expanse. A singular, colossal cloud hovered like a permanent wound, sealing the entire city in a blanket of artificial night. No sun. No stars. Only a thick veil of grey that swallowed the concept of morning. The villagers called it the Hollow Ceiling, and none remembered what the sky used to look like—if it had ever been visible at all.
Encircling the village like a scar was a trench. Not a defensive moat or a naturally formed canyon—this was a chasm. Precisely carved, hauntingly symmetrical, and impossibly deep. A thousand feet, maybe more. No one had ever measured. Why would they? Anything that went in never came back. Why measure death when death didn't care to be measured?
On the far side of this abyss, just beyond visible reach, the trees began—their crimson leaves like bleeding veins clawing up from the earth. But the villagers didn't see them. Not truly. The trees remained blurred phantoms at the edge of perception, dismissed as tricks of the cloud-covered light. After all, it was easier not to ask questions in a place obviously built on forgetting
Life crawled on. Men and women sat on their porches—if the single slabs of crumbled stone they called porches counted—staring into nothing. Others prayed at the narrow cathedral wedged between leaning buildings, their muttered devotions offered to an unnamed god, faceless and indifferent. They asked not for salvation, but for survival. To last one more day. Some didn't even pray for that.
In the center of the village stood the impossible. A gleaming golden tower. Pristine. Perfect. Unaged. It rose like a divine shining statue to the suffering around it, piercing the clouds above. None of them had ever seen the top. No sane person dared to climb it. Only fools and those chosen by the unfathomable tower-lords had stepped in its glory.
It was the only thing left untouched by dust, time, or despair. The people simply accepted it, the way one might accept a scar they can't recall receiving. Every now and then, some psycho done with their poverty stricken life would try challenging the ones above or even try climbing it themselves. They were never seen again.
And then—something new.
A tremor not in the earth, but in the air itself.
A portal shimmered into being just beside the tower. Not a flash of color, not some dazzling spectacle—no, this was absence incarnate. A window carved out of reality. A perfect circle of anti-light. People noticed. Eyes turned. A crowd began to gather, slow at first, then hungrier, more desperate. They murmured, coughed, pointed, whispered old rumors they weren't sure they believed.
"It's them! They're back!" someone cried. "Them slithering cowardly corrupts are back!"
From the shifting hole stepped a figure cloaked in immaculate white. Their visor was woven from silver-threaded silk, strange symbols embroidered across its surface in angles the eye resisted tracing.
"Ahh, isn't it nice to be free? I pity those who haven't experienced freedom."
The crowd registered the person's rambling as nonsense.
They carried an aura that didn't command attention so much as dismantle resistance. It wasn't divine. It wasn't cruel. It simply was. And in their arms—Brin. Rei. Mira. Riven. Sir Calden. Unconscious, but unmistakably alive.
Then came another.
Magenta.
Intricately embroidered. Visor gleaming with harsher strokes—aggression dressed in elegance. In their arms—Erasmus.
"Whatever you say.. Let's just get the kids away from this filthy place."
The murmurs turned sharp, acidic. Both from the blatant insult and the newcomer.
"Who's the kid? I don't remember another rotten brat going into the bloody forests."
"Someone they abducted?"
"Definitely a new experiment."
"For gods' sake, who knows what those tower-lords do in their spare time. Bet they sip wine made of prayer and bathe in sins they charge us for."
Then the one in white clapped.
It wasn't loud. It didn't need to be.
The air cracked. The sound peeled silence over the village like an iron sheet.
They smiled, calm and pristine. "Now, now. Let's not scare the newly promoted knights. They've just woken to an adoring crowd."
With a snap of their fingers, the sleeping beauties tiredly awoke.
Eyes opened.
—
Erasmus stirred.
Not by will.
By force.
It was as if something had reached into the cortex of his mind and twisted. Not a whisper. Not a call. A command.
Wake.
He gasped once—not in fear, but clarity. His vision came back in stages. Blurred shadows, streaks of gold, coughing silhouettes. A wall of cracked stone. Then—focus.
The disease stricken air. The oppressive covered sky. The sensation of having moved without ever choosing to.
But not surprised.
Not disoriented.
Others might've screamed. Might've collapsed under the impossibility of it all.
But Erasmus... simply sighed as he started thinking of what to do next.
A breath whispered through his thoughts, calm as scripture.
I finally have arrived.